for people who care about the West

The end of something really big

As soon as we read about the dead whale, it
was clear we were about to take a field trip.

"Let’s go," said my friend Nathan, peering at a newspaper
photo of a giant beached vertebrae. He’s a sculptor, so he
has an artist’s appreciation for bones. Besides, his mother
had recently cracked one of her own vertebrae in a boating
accident, and he thought a photograph of a jumbo replacement would
make a perfect gift. I’ve known Nathan since we were both in
nursery school, and I’ve learned to trust his instincts.

So Nathan, his wife Morgan, and I piled in their Subaru
and set out for Half Moon Bay, winding over the Coast Range of
California and abruptly trading sun for long fingers of late summer
fog. The beach, when we arrived, was blanketed by clouds. We asked
a lone man on a horse about the whale, and he pointed and wrinkled
his nose. "Esta casi descompuesta," he said,
which, I slowly remembered, meant that the whale had seen much,
much better days.

We crested a rise, and there it was, a
dark blotch in the surf surrounded by a handful of onlookers. As we
approached, we could see that the waves and the sand had reduced
the whale to a great shred of flesh, which sloshed limply in the
sea.

No one was certain how this young humpback had died.
Federal officials had recorded its cause of death as "unknown,"
surmising that the shark bites on its body had been inflicted only
after its death. All we knew was that it had washed into the surf
zone nearly a week ago, and that in recent days, the sea had
gradually pushed it along the state beach. The endangered mammal
had quickly created something of a stink, both literal and
political.

When the 35-foot-long body swelled to
grotesque extremes, local officials warned off gawkers, since gases
inside the whale’s stomach could cause it to explode. And who
would want to be showered with whale parts? The carcass soon
deflated without incident, but its rotting flesh began to reek, and
local and state bureaucrats squabbled over how to get rid of it.

The day before we visited, the state had tried to tow the
remains out to sea, but the rope had broken, and the ebbing tide
had postponed a second attempt. "I think everybody is hoping the
tide will take it out, and it will become someone else's problem,"
a member of the local police department told the press.

But the whale’s body had, stubbornly, remained close to
shore. The three of us stood on the beach, just out of reach of the
waves, and looked at the disorderly mass of bones and flesh. Yet as
the remains of its tail and barnacled flippers heaved in the ocean,
it was still possible to imagine how the young humpback might have
breached and leaped in the open sea, how it might have jostled with
others in its pod.

It was as close as I had ever gotten
to a whale, and, rot aside, I was awed by its size and bulk, its so
recently powerful body. Near us stood two other carcass tourists, a
middle-aged man and his young son. Nathan asked the man about the
whale and its postmortem migrations, and soon the two of them had
forgotten the whale, embarking instead on a discussion of local
politics and the recent Supreme Court decision on eminent domain.

The boy, about 10, crouched at his father’s feet,
the adult small talk cresting over him. Suddenly he looked up and,
with preternatural clarity, said, "Hey, excuse me? We’re
standing right in front of a dead whale. What happened to that
topic?" We all laughed, surprised. "We moved on," said Nathan in a
friendly way, and then he pointed at what remained of the humpback.
"And so has he."

To the north, another father supervised
the construction of elaborate sandcastles. A couple walked behind
us, laughing and talking. But for a moment, our small group took on
a funereal mood. We stood close together, looking out at the gray
sky and the chilly sea and the whale’s discarded earthly
suit, tossing and turning in the waves.

Several days
later, the whale’s body traveled yet again, finally lodging
itself in a rocky crevice beneath the beachfront Ritz-Carlton
Hotel. There it remained, far from the more dignified depths of the
open sea.

Michelle Nijhuis is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). She lives and writes in Paonia,
Colorado.

Note: the opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of High Country News, its board or staff. If you'd like to share an opinion piece of your own, please write Betsy Marston at [email protected].